


and i don't want your pity (i just want somebody near me)

by Isolatedwriting



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Drugs, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Kinda, Murder, Obsession, Smut, Update theres more now, abby overstaying her welcome, and she fucks the haunting, anyway the girls arent okay, anyway very sad but oddly hopeful but also horrible, dina and maria are only in chapter 2, ellie being self destructive, ellie is majorly haunted in more ways than one, its a dark one guys but this has vibes, its got it all, lifes welcome that is, normal tlou stuff, suicide is mentioned, yeah lots of death you guys fair warning, yes i frontloaded smut its called having Creative Vision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:34:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29664603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isolatedwriting/pseuds/Isolatedwriting
Summary: "There’s nothing for her here, nothing but death and rot and sun, but she's afraid to move. Where could she go that would have her now?"Or:Ellie goes down a darker path, and it follows her everywhere
Relationships: Abby & Ellie (The Last of Us), Abby/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 63





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aka i watched the Haunting series and am also very depressed. Clearly I really enjoyed it 10/10

Ellie doesn't know what’s keeping her going anymore.

She’s done it, but now she thinks she might be dying.

Blindly, she's found her way to a little strip mall, and hidden there to let her body heal, but it doesn't seem to be working. For a little while, Ellie thinks she might even be turning, but it doesn't happen. She wonders if maybe that’s too lenient an end for her now.

There are painkillers to be found, some bandages, and she does what she can for her wounds, but her left hand is useless, and its slow going. It'll need more than painkillers, and Ellie can already feel the infection spurring on a headache. She doesn't know where to go.

Instead of deciding right away, she holes up in the back office of the nearest store, like a dog curls up to die. But she’s not dying. At least not yet.

She doesn't know how long she has been here, but the gashes on her arms are crusting over, and she knows its time to move on - that she will not make it back to Jackson if she does not leave now - but she can't bring herself to leave. Her head spins when she stands, and more than once she swears she sees figures hiding amongst the shelves.

It’s here in this horrible place that that she first sees her, and realises that she is not out of the woods just yet.

Abby appears as she had last seen her, sunburned and broken behind the eyes. She comes with the scent of blood and seawater, and Ellie stumbles away from her just as she is spotted. Abby looks lost, and when she opens her mouth to speak, blood pours out as if from an open wound. Her jaw snaps shut as Abby looks down at herself, takes in how red blood can look on dead skin, before she looks up at Ellie with so much fear that it makes sickness rise up Ellie's throat.

"What happened to me?" Abby chokes wetly. Her shirt is soaked with blood, and Ellie wonders where it could all be coming from. It’s like its seeping directly out of her pores. "Where's Lev?"

Ellie doesn't have anything to give her, and no voice to speak it with. "Where is he?" Abby's agony turns vicious, and she bares her teeth, spitting her words out like they are burning her. When Ellie doesn't answer, the weakened state Abby is in appears to fade away under her anguish, and she charges forward with a scream. Ellie raises her red-stained arms in front of her as one last line of defence, but nothing ever comes.

When she opens her eyes, she's alone again. Its dark, almost too dark to see, and it's as if she’s lost time. She swears it was early before, that she saw sun glinting in the pool of blood Abby left behind her.

She must have been mistaken.

*

She doesn't find any antibiotics, so once she is healed enough to travel, she packs her things and leaves to try and source some. She had tried to keep her hand clean and freshly bandaged, but the stumps burn through the cloth, and she knows they need more than she is giving them.

Trust Abby to give her one last thing to remember her by. _Or two less…_

There’s a small doctors office not far from her, she remembers passing it on the way into town, so she makes for that. The infected she meets are mercifully quiet. Without her switchblade she feels unsteady, but its like they have no taste for her. Like she’s already gone bad in the sun. She watches them glide around in the grass behind her like scavengers, and flips them off when they get too close. She doesn't have enough bullets to waste after her siege, and they are harmless. She names the ones she sees more than once.

It takes her days to make the journey she had made in hours before, but that feels like another life, another her, and she sleeps the nights in dilapidated houses, each time afraid to close her eyes and be back on the beach, holding a knife to a child's neck. She’s not seen another person since then, and there's a tiny part of her that wonders if maybe she didn't make it after all, but that could be the infection talking. Her side has begun to ooze yellow pus, and her fingers still bleed. 

She cauterises them after five days of reopening them every night, clawing at her own arms in her sleep. It hurts more than she expected, but its nothing compared to the chemical burn, and she bites down on her belt to keep the screams quiet. Her two favourite stalkers (Joanne and Sammy) are at the windows, pressed up and watching her like she’s an animal in a zoo, but she passes out before she can give out to them properly.

She sees her a second time that night, when she wakes up feverish and thirsty. She’s sitting on the floor beside her and picking at the splinters in fractured hardwood floors. Ellie doesn't even register that she’s back to the way she looked before, complete with the braid, until she speaks.

"What did you do?"

Ellie ignores her, and reaches weakly out for her drink. Abby darts out to grab her, hands cold and wet on Ellie's forearm, disturbingly real, but Ellie has had time to make up her mind and decide that she isn't going crazy. She’s sick. "You're not real." The grip on her arm gets tight enough to hurt, but she tries to ignore the pain. "Let me go."

"Make me, if I'm not real." Ellie rolls her eyes. She might have fought to explain that this is her brain punishing her, that she almost expected this the moment she had followed her into the shallows, but she would just be talking to herself. She sits up and grabs her water with her other hand instead, staring over at the figment of the woman she had obsessed over for years. She had never really gotten a good look at her before, and she’s surprised by the details her mind has retained to rebuild her like this. She doesn't let herself blink while she drinks her fill, and Abby stares right back.

Slowly, a grin stretches across Abby's face, almost a smirk, but it doesn't look right on her, like its being pulled on strings hooked into her skin. "Did you know my father was a doctor?" She says, and just as Ellie frowns, fragments of information floating around menacingly in the back of her mind, but not fitting together under the stress of her fever. She’s beginning to sweat, and she blames a spike in her temperature instead of the dread in her stomach. 

Abby releases her arm, returns to picking at the floor. "You... you're poison." She says, and Ellie wishes she had the strength to argue. "Do you think you're dying?"

Ellie knows its just her mind asking her that, and it has been something she’s dwelled on, so she answers honestly. "I hope I am."

She must have passed out again, because next thing she knows, she's alone again.

The next morning, she remembers it like a dream, and doesn't give it a second thought.

*

She doesn't know how many days its been since she saw a living person. Every day, she gets up and walks as far as she can before collapsing in the first house she sees, until the morning comes when she doesn't want to get up anymore.

She doesn't know if its physical exhaustion, her body beginning the stages of shutting down, or just her will to live finally giving out under her expectations. She wanted her life to mean something.

Abby’s there again. She has been around a lot the past few days, appearing in the corner of Ellie's eye, flanked by the infected, but she's never there when Ellie can muster the energy to look. It's irritating, but there’s nothing she can do about it, so she settles for cursing at the spectators. This morning though, she pays Ellie no attention, and somehow that's just as annoying.

"Why is it always you?" She asks, out of the blue. Abby jumps at her voice, but it doesn't really sound like her voice anymore anyway. "Why not Jesse? Or can you do living people too? Dina would hurt." Abby laughs at her, healthy and strong and towering over Ellie as she drifts soundlessly to her side. She doesn't smile anymore, but she's had sad eyes for a long time, and Ellie barely notices the extra weight in them today.

"Would you not want to see Joel?" She asks, malice dripping off of her like seawater. Ellie recoils down into her blanket and away from her.

"No."

"Why not? You avenged him, wouldn't it feel good to look him in the eye and tell him all about it?" Abby looks at her like she knows exactly how much her words sting, and if Ellie had the balls to actually face her (instead of keeping her safe in her peripherals) she might have seen that she was crying. A lot actually. She doesn't let herself register it until she’s wailing beside her like a banshee, and by then she’s blocking her ears and squeezing her eyes shut so tight it makes her head spin.

Her left hand feels hotter than fire when she presses it up to her head. She wants to split her skull open between her remaining fingers, taking her mutated brains apart in her hands. It’s as useful as they will ever be now anyway. Abby could have done it - crushed her head in her hands like a grape. If she were actually there. Which she isn't. Ellie is alone. She is going to die alone.

Abby’s cries rip through her worse than any infected could, and she’s reaching boiling point fast, fisting her greasy hair into clumps at the top of her head to try and relieve pressure, but it doesn't work, and eventually the frustration comes out of her like a croaked scream. She can hear Abby gasping for breath and pities her, because she only has that left to give.

"Go away." She whines, the last of her energy spent on keeping her pain in check. She wants to die.

After a moment of silence, Ellie realises that she’s abandoned her once again.

*

Eventually, Ellie gets lucky, and her fever begins to break. She doesn't know what’s gotten her through it, but its just in time. She's running out of food.

The first day she trusts herself to walk without collapsing in the street, she picks a direction and goes. She thinks she saw a grocery store during the trek to the pharmacy. She has taken to writing down what she sees, because she doesn't trust her memory anymore, and traces her drawings of people she once loved, because she’s decided she’s too far gone now. She doesn't even know why she's going for food, when she'll probably not survive to die of hunger. She still has bullets to spare.

With that in mind, she takes some detours, ignoring the rumbling of her stomach. She finds an old gift shop by the sea, and tugs on a novelty shirt over the torn and bloodied remains of her own. She still needs to find medicine, but her side is miraculously healing. She wonders how her body can so stubbornly cling to life, when she herself had seen it snuffed out so easily.

There’s some old candy bars there too, and she chews on them without tasting a thing, but it gives her the energy to make it to a house to sleep in, and by the time she wakes up in the morning, and looks out to the sea, she finds she’s not gotten that far. She imagines she's not far from Abby's boat. She's not there with her, but she suddenly feels an urge to go to it that feels so outside of herself that she physically blanches. Still, she has no direction that calls to her more. So she starts walking.

Abby meets her halfway, falling into step with her out of nowhere like they were friends in one of those awful high-school movies.

"Where are you going?"

"Where do you think?"

Abby’s eyebrows shoot up on her face, but she starts guessing. She looks manic, messier than usual, but Ellie doesn't think much of it. "Are you going back to the Rattler camp? Maybe there's one or two left alive, they might kill you if you ask nicely."

"Not there." Ellie groans, but pushes forward, ignoring Abby. She doesn't even know why she's replying, since this is all in her head, but she hasn't spoken to another person in so long, and even she can't escape loneliness. She wants to talk to someone other than herself. She doesn't like herself much anyway.

"Mmm, are you going back to defile my corpse?" Ellie looks to her with a pained expression, but Abby is staring straight ahead at the street signs, the graffiti covered houses around them. Not at Ellie. Not even the voice in her head wants to look at her. Ellie isn't surprised. "I understand if you do but leave me out of it. I've been back, and its not pretty."

"Leave me alone."

Abby shrugs. "There’s no where else to be."

She fades in and out of Ellie's awareness until they reach the beach, where she catches on the dunes. Ellie looks back to her. "Are you coming?" Abby looks down at her lost floating home, and for a moment Ellie thinks she might cry again, so she gives up on getting her stray to follow, and heads down on her own.

The sun is blisteringly hot, but her skin had recovered a little in her self imposed isolation, so she bares it without too much pain. The sand slows her down, but she marches through it and into the water without thinking about why she is here. It’s not like she hadn't scouted the place already. There had been some food, but its probably gone bad in the months its stewed for. Still, there's something that drove her here, and she climbs aboard with minimal injury.

The cabin is mercifully shady, and she sighs at the relief once she’s out of the sun. She needs to sit for a moment when she arrives, tossing her backpack on the seat beside her, and she takes a steady breath. It's oddly nice, to be somewhere she’s been before, and she wants to sleep.

So she does, and when she wakes up she’s in the pitch black of it all. No starlight reaches her through the doors, and there's a desperate few seconds before Ellie can get her flashlight on where she cannot breathe for fear of whatever might be in there with her. The light reflects back at her in Abby's eyes, and she starts, but she's not as frightened as she should be. "You again?”

"You were dreaming." She says, and Ellie frowns at her, because she doesn't remember any dreams.

"Oh yeah?" She stretches, wincing when she pulls on makeshift stitches. Abby just nods, and Ellie switches off her light, comforted that she’s where she should be and that there is no danger. She can hear Abby breathing now though, a horrible gurgling sound, and its keeping her awake. "Knock it off."

Though she can't see it, she feels Abby shake her head, and its confirmed when she follows it up with a scoff.

"How are you not dead yet?"

"Beats me."

"You seemed scared when you woke up." Ellie chooses to ignore her. "What could you possibly be scared of?"

Ellie ducks her head, trying to hide the way her face crumbles because _this is it_. This is where she was always going to end up. And Abby should know that. Maybe she does, and she’s just taunting her. She pushes it all away.

"Please, be quiet..." Ellie murmurs, but there is Abby’s broken breathing again, and when she opens her eyes, she sees her as she really is, as the corpse she left floating in the water. Her blue eyes are washed out and red, full of blood where the vessels had popped with strain, and they are locked on Ellie. She grabs a note from the counter, holding it up in front of Ellie with serrated fingers that would never heal.

"Did you read this?" She demands. Ellie shrugs.

"I never believed in an afterlife, but after Owen..." Abby sighs, a horrible choked sound that makes Ellie feel sick. There’s water pooling underneath her, and its swirling with red. "But I can’t find him, so I don't know what this is."

"This is my head telling me suicide is actually a good option." Ellie grumbles, before pulling the blanket over her head. Abby's face is already stitched into the back of her eyes, she doesn't need to look at her anymore. Especially like this.

The sun starts rising again, and Ellie knows she should get up and move on again, but she's so worn out. She sketches the cabin instead, down to the little details. There’s a shark plushie that she had pulled to her chest in the night, and she doesn't know where it belonged before she arrived, so she puts it in the centre back, on the bed where it makes sense to put it.

"There’s still a little fuel in the boat, you should move it." Abby appears just as she finishes up, looming over her shoulder and all put back together again. Her braid swings down between them and into Ellie's face. She bats it away. "That's good."

"Thanks." Ellie snaps her journal shut. It isn’t a bad idea though. She should have thought of checking the fuel tank.

There’s not much, but it'll get her away from _here_. She even gets the engine going, but for the life of her, she can't put the thing into motion. There’s nothing for her here, nothing but death and rot and sun, but she's afraid to move. Where could she go that would have her now?

Abby is there, but she's quiet on the deck, and its a welcome change of pace. She only looks up from the horizon when the motor starts to spin. Ellie meets her eyes by accident. "Bet you don't want to leave." She says, the way she would to a cat that followed her home. "Please disembark if you are not intending to travel."

There no movement, but Ellie thinks she knows her own delusion well enough that moving forward will get rid of them for her. Abby goes back to looking out at the sea again, so she turns her head and her resolve to just do something about it. She pushes forward on the lever, and the boat creaks loudly before it begins to move. She doesn't look back to see when Abby fades away, but she's not there anymore when her vision begins to blur a little and Ellie turns in for the night.

Yes, she’s no longer at the tail of the boat, because she just moved into the cabin. Ellie groans when she sees her, but it quickly turns vicious when she sees what she’s doing. "Put that down."

Abby looks up, startled by the intrusion, but she closes Ellie's journal, holding it up in front of her like Ellie has a gun to her head. When she doesn't move to take it from her though, Abby smiles wickedly. "I think I got the highlights." She says. "There’s a lot more romance than I expected, but its a thrilling read. You could have sold this in the old world."

"Old world..." Ellie mocks, and if she had the ammo she would have shot rounds into the empty space on the bench where Abby is sitting. Hell, she would have sank the boat to do it. Slowly, she climbs down into the cabin with her.

Abby throws the book down with a thud. "You didn't drop the anchor."

"Okay." Ellie says, but she has no desire to go back outside. Her arms hurt from fighting the shaky craft to where it floated currently, and she isn't going anywhere anyway. Who cares where she wakes up. Abby shakes her head at her in bewilderment.

"You'll lose course, or crash into rocks in the night."

"I don't see why you would care, you're already dead." Ellie pauses midway to the bed, like she hasn't really realised before now that she’s _done it_. All those promises in that book on the table, she’s fulfilled them. She should feel good.

Sleep would feel good, so she lays down and faces the wall. Abby isn't so loud tonight - in fact, she doesn't hear her at all, and when she takes a peak, she’s gone again - but she struggles to fall asleep. Her heart is beating hard in her chest, and she wonders at how she had gotten here. She should be back in Wyoming, in a bed that doesn't sway, with Dina in her arms. On nights like these in Jackson, Dina might have slipped a leg over her waist and leaned down to kiss her, pressed so tightly together that she'd feel her nipples getting hard through her shirt.

Eventually, Ellie lets herself go to the memory; back when she felt warm and safe and _loved_. She doesn't think she will ever feel loved again.

So she sinks her good hand down her stomach and through course hair, rubbing gently between her thighs. It feels better than anything has in months, so she kicks her well worn jeans down her legs (she hasn't taken them off in days, and the strangled skin tingles when it meets air) and gives in to it. Her nerves are on fire, but she tries to stay still and quiet as possible, the way she would have when JJ was down the hall, muffing herself with her arm when she moans.

Ellie likes pleasuring herself, but its not something she has indulged in for a while. She coats her fingers in slick, lets her whines rip from her throat freely because who is around to hear her anymore. There’s no JJ, no one anywhere around her, and even though it hurts, it means she is free. She doesn't know how good freedom feels anymore.

She enters herself roughly, a little quicker than she usually would, a little harder than she usually would, and her body pushes back, urging her on. Its everything she needs it to be, and she sets a steady pace for herself. Her moans echo back at her from the narrow walls, and with them comes a wisp of cold air. Ellie risks a look, and Abby is back, sitting as far away as she can without spilling out the door. Her knuckles are white where they are gripping her knees, and she looks as confused and horrified as Ellie is to be there.

But Ellie doesn't let it matter. She’s chasing after the only high she has left, and she will be damned if she will let her brain ruin this for her. She tries to scoff, to take some power in this, but it comes out more like a sigh.

"Prude." She finally chokes, laughing at the uncomfortable energy Abby leeches into the room, and thrilling in knowing that she is the cause. Abby refuses to look at her, just stares straight ahead blankly until Ellie hits that spot inside of herself that makes her see spots, and she moans openly, gasping to take in breath as she pounds it out of herself. Abby shakes her head, but then she’s smiling over at her. Its oddly bestial, and it transforms the situation. Ellie feels vulnerable. She opens her legs wider to prove the dynamic wrong.

"So, do you believe I'm real now?" Abby asks. She’s standing now, paces closer but Ellie doesn’t see her move. "Because if I'm not, then you want me here." Her tone is acidic, and Ellie tries to bring herself back to Jackson; to softness and safety and _love_ , but Abby takes that from her too. "Don't you want to see your girlfriend?" That’s it. _Pity_.

Ellie's body shudders, but she makes no attempt to respond. She knows what she could say; that the same sentiment could be made of Abby. If she is real, then she wants to be here too; because Ellie is willing to reconsider the existence of ghosts, if that means she can shut reality away and just have this. Pleasure shoots up her spine as the heel of her hand rubs against her clit, her fingers spreading herself open, but there's no resistance anymore. She’s wet, and wanting, and she’s not going to let this go.

Abby doesn't like that. She knows that by the sound alone, her stuttering breath and muttered insults.

"That’s my bed." She says, like she’s just realised it. Ellie wants to laugh, but she’s too focused on how close she is already, how good it feels to just let go. Her left hand creeps slowly up her stomach to her chest, palming herself through her bra and ignoring the pain that shoots up her arm from her stubs. She can't let Abby take this from her now. She can huff and puff up all she wants; whether she’s a delusion or something else, Ellie doesn't care. She hasn't let anything stop her before.

She can feel eyes on her, and as much as it makes her feel bad, its exciting.

"Look at me!" It comes at her like a shock wave, and Ellie's eyes snap open to retaliate, but Abby is suddenly _right_ there. Ellie wishes she had somewhere to go, somewhere to back away too, but the mattress has no give.

She’s above her, staring down with such distaste and horror that Ellie can't help but lock her eyes shut again. _Think of Jackson, think of Dina, think of anything else but this_.

"You're disgusting." She says, but Ellie doesn't care. She is lost to the feeling of her hand between her legs, scissoring her fingers inside herself before resuming her brutal pace. She doesn't look up at Abby again, but she can feel her there, can smell the salty smell of her and the icy stab of her breath. She lets it spur her on, because she can be warm again, if she tries.

She’s fucking herself hard, trying to withdraw into her body as much as she can, but she can feel the cold air move as Abby does. She knows she’s laying next to her now, no longer floating above her like some kind of spectral demon, and she doesn't want to open her eyes, so she grits her teeth against the instinct. Abby reaches out and grabs her wrist through the sheet, hard enough to bruise Ellie's fragile, burnt skin.

"This is my fucking bed." She growls. Ellie's hips jump up to try and meet her fingers again, but Abby's hold is strong, and she can barely brush the hood of her clit under Abby's restraint, but it still makes her shake. A moan slips past her lips and Abby recoils like it shocked her. Ellie sinks back inside herself, not missing a beat even with the intrusion. Her arm is starting to ache, but she can feel her orgasm incoming, and picks up the pace, slipping a third finger inside her cunt just to make herself sweat.

Abby fumes beside her - she feels her energy swirling around, and its dark but humouring - until she doesn't anymore. Ellie's leg bumps solidly against her, stretching out across the bed openly, and she feels the weight of a braid fall over her shoulder as Abby enters her space.

When she touches her, Ellie shudders, not because she is affected, but because she is cold. Or at least, that's how she justifies it to herself. Abby is slow moving, but all consuming, her touch hard but fleeting, fading in and out of reality as Ellie fights to try and make sense of this. She bucks up against her own hand, if it even is her own, as Abby flickers around her. It’s as if there are hands all over her, phantom touches that don't make sense but Ellie is too wet and too close to care anymore. She’s almost there, and she curls her fingers, trying to hit that spot inside of her that will put her over the edge.

"Y'know, my friend used to say you only ever needed three," Abby rasps in her ear. She’s all she can hear, drowning out the lap of the water against the boat, and the sound of Ellie's own heartbeat in her ears. "But I think you can take more." Ellie groans, yearning closer to the edge. She feels distant, and _full_ , and the fingers inside her don’t feel like her own anymore but she doesn't care about any of that. She pants against Abby's skin, drawing in the smell of death and seawater like its divine.

She’s close, so she listens to Abby's rattling chest, focuses on what it felt to have someone this close to her again and to not fear for her life. She feels like she might never have this again.

She cums hard and suddenly, jerking up and against the only kind of person who could ever have her anymore. Abby is cold and hard and feels more solid that she does these days, and she clings to her because there's no where else for her to go. She feels the connection fading as her nerves fire off and the high begins to settle again, dragging her away from whatever peace she can find here. Fuck Cali.

She doesn't dare open her eyes, but she knows Abby is there. She knows she’s there because as soon as Ellie slips out of herself and sighs back down to rest, she vaults over her lap and makes desperately for the door, like she is racing to fight seasickness, but she's gone by the time Ellie turns her head to watch. Faded back into nothing. Ellie is alone again.

She pants into the empty air, the sounds of reality bleeding back to her, until the shame comes rolling back in.

She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She feels cold, and that wandering jolt of _life_ is beginning to fade into the background already. She closes her eyes, because sleep will help, and tries not to let the ice reach her heart.

Even though she has never felt worse, she cries a little less, and it’s a little easier to drift off. When she finally emerges from the cabin in the morning, she notices the anchor is down, and goes right back inside.

*

It takes two days for the boat to run out of fuel, which is more than Ellie expected, and more than she thinks she deserves. She leaves it in a little cove, and begins the short but energy consuming swim to shore. 

Abby appears midway up the beach, sitting tiredly on a bit of upturned driftwood. Ellie makes her way towards her dejectedly, kicking up sand as she goes. Its felt like she has had some in her shoes for weeks.

"Fancy seeing you here." She says, and she means it. Abby has been around, but only in the corner of her eye, never fully there, and its _lonely_. She's just glad to see a face, even if it is hers.

Besides, she thought Abby might stay on the boat, or maybe Ellie ruined that for her too. That is, if she were actually a 'ghost', which Ellie still wrestles with every time she notices a presence around her. Abby’s words ring in her ears, trying to logic past her defences, but she doesn't want to answer that question. Does it even matter anymore?

Didn't she deserve to carry her around for the rest of her life? Maybe Abby lived like this too. Before she killed her.

"Are you going home yet?"

Ellie shrugs, because she really doesn't know. "There’s nothing for me there." Abby stares down at the ground, her frown stretching down from her face to consume the rest of her figure.

"You should go home." She says. Ellie laughs, but when she rolls her eyes back over, Abby is gone. She shakes her head, because she never expected her to be this timid, but continues up towards the sandy lodges at the edge of town. She can hear infected before she even gets back to the road, so she steers off the path and towards silence.

Abby was right of course. She should try and go home, but the idea of facing Dina with all this blood on her hands, so fresh and so red, is too difficult. She doesn't orientate herself.

She makes for a quiet building, somewhere she can curl back up and waste away in the safest way possible, and counts her cans of food. There were three on the boat, and she still has a little beef jerky too. Its not much, but it's enough to keep her stomach from crumbling. 

She’s just starting to miss her stalkers, left behind when she took to the seas, when Abby is there again. Ellie greets her, something she’s never done formally before, and Abby looks at her like she’s lost her mind. Maybe she has.

Abby stands awkwardly for a moment in front of her, arms crossed and thoughtful. She doesn't have much of a poker face, Ellie notes, because she can see her thinking, making a decision, and schooling her features when she does.

"Go home." She says. "You need your people now." Ellie can't fathom how to answer her. Her mouth hangs stupidly open as she tries to formulate something that makes sense.

"Why do you care what I do?" She asks. She’s still unsure of why exactly she is asking - still sure she is dying of blood poisoning and hallucinating on her way out - but she’s curious to hear her answer. Abby shrugs.

"I don't have anyone else." She finally mutters. _You killed them. Every single one_. Ellie wants to cry with her this time, for the people she has taken down with her.

She nods her head, solemn and tired and so, so lonely. She’s right. Ellie finds herself wanting her mom, for the first time in such a long time that it takes her a second to even identify the feeling, and when she crawls into bed that night, she cradles her damaged hand to her chest and just _mourns_. She thinks of Joel, of Jesse, of that pregnant girl whose blood she spilled on the floor of an aquarium. She knows Abby would know her name, but she doesn't dare ask it.

Ellie tries her best to let it all out here, in California, and sleeps with her back to the door just once, because Abby is watching it for her. She promises to watch it for her, and Ellie decides to trust her.

That night, she resolves to return to Jackson, or at least to try. Because she’s (miraculously) still alive, and people say life is for the living. It didn't often feel that way, but Ellie has heard people say it, and she can decide to believe it. She can decide to be happy.

Tomorrow she will start heading North, and see where she ends up. Day by day. Endure and survive, or whatever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed, and leave me a comment if you'd like (im in quarantine and so in need of validation) 
> 
> Fun fact I lost half of this fic last night and rewrote basically the whole thing today, so im sorry if things feel badly paced, theres a good chance we lost a scene or two in the war, rip
> 
> Anyway tumblr is abbysratking 
> 
> Stay safe!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie makes it back to Jackson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to user writerly for bouncing ideas with me about this au because im kind of obsessed with it, and also for the intro, which was a gift to beautiful to rework ❤
> 
> Also scorned woman Dina rights

Ellie comes back to Jackson.

The town can't quite believe it, whispers spreading her arrival like wildfire. _Did you hear? She's back. Did you see?_

She looks skeletal, hollow in so many ways, hardly looks at the people around her as she passes by. Someone escorts her to Maria's home, and though Maria's eyes glimmer with unshed pain as she opens the door, she doesn't cry.

Her remaining belongings tell a story of scarcity. Of hunger, of death, of leaving behind. She has Joel's gun and one bullet left in the chamber. There's so much more that she returned without.

They talk, her and Maria, but in reality Maria is the one who does most of the talking. Ellie sits in one of the arm chairs, legs pulled up onto the seat, holding them tight to her own body. And Dina, she asks. And JJ?

Maria tells her what she's missed. How she was missed. She tells her about the evening Dina showed up with tear-swollen eyes and a restless JJ on her hips. And Ellie listens, drinks in the words like they're the only thing nourishment she needs, while her body is paper thin, a shell of who she once was.

"I'm fine," she insists, waving off Maria's concerns and offers of a trip to their physician. "All I need is a roof and a bed."

They give her a room, then later a house - a renovated garage that reminds her of Jackson before. Before Joel died, before Abby. Before everything slipped through Ellie's fingers like the fine sand on the Santa Barbara beaches.

It's not the garage on Joel's lot. That house now belongs to a family of four. Ellie curls up in the bed, pulling the covers over her shoulders despite the mild autumn night. A cold draft chills the room, carrying the scent of sea salt and rot, and there she is. Pale. Tall. Ellie's personal ghost, looming near the couch Ellie dropped her backpack on.

Ellie breathes in deeply, rolling onto her side and turning her back on Abby although there's no escaping the judgement her aura bleeds into the room. The sheets on the bed are clean against her crusty skin, soft and inoffensive. They smell faintly of the soap Joel used. The soap near everyone in Jackson used, and still uses, clearly.

"Can't believe you didn't go see her." Abby's lungs rattle as she speaks, words wet.

Ellie pulls the comforter up until the fabric covers her ears. She closes her eyes, turns inward and feels her aching muscles lean into the thickness of the mattrass. Beside her, the bed dips down.

"You're so fucking stupid."

And Ellie agrees most days, but not today. "You know why I can't," she mumbles, tongue thick with sleep from being exhausted since the moment she didn't die. She can't because everything she touches ends up worse than it was before. Even Death-capital-D doesn't want anything to do with her it seems, because she's still here. She's still breathing. She's still aching and empty and wrong to her very core.

Coming back to Jackson now feels like a mistake when she's still a mistake and she isn't sure if she can stay here after all. There was no revelation the moment she crossed the border of the gate into town. There was just nothingness, the same void that threatens to eat her whole but never quite manages to come through with it. Sometimes she imagines it's the shape of her soul, a paper cut-out waiting for her to come home, but if she had a soul - if she believed in them - then hers is surely damned.

An icy weight crawls up against her back, a heaviness wrapping around her stomach. Trapping her. Abby's breath cools the back of Ellie's neck, and Ellie likes to imagine... she likes to believe that it's real, sometimes. She's learned to accept this of herself. She shifts under the covers until her hand brushes against the shadow of another, a layer of cloth between them, and the shadow doesn't move.

And it's as okay as anything can be.

So she sleeps.

*

She doesn’t leave again for three days.

Food shows up, but most of her time is spent in bed, and she pretends to sleep whenever someone dares peak in on her.

Abby doesn’t help, prickling up when footsteps get too close. She’s as bad as Ellie, and her usual pride tending to crack when there are strange men in the house. She’s less a guard dog, more like a rescue, and Ellie doesn’t have the energy to devote to anything like that.

Abby has kept her distance since that first night, mostly curling up in a corner by the door when she’s visible at all, and Ellie doesn’t know if its her fault or just the result of being back here. Both seem equally understandable, and Ellie doesn’t call her out. She’s still there, and that’s more than most.

That third day though, when she does finally slither from the house in search of food, she goes alone.

Thankfully, the streets are quiet, and she is granted some anonymity with her hood up and eyes down. Her skin crawls when the locals get too close to her, and she needs to stop to breathe in a quiet corner after only a few minutes.

That’s the first time she sees her. Dina, with a bag of food under her arm. Her hair swings behind her in a tight ponytail that reminds Ellie of just what she’s done to land them both here, separately. Why she’s not carrying those groceries, with strong arms, and a smile that matches her love's.

She looks good, healthy and happy in the way that glows out of you like sunshine, and Ellie has to fight not to stare directly into it. She trips over a loose stone in the street.

“Ellie?” Its strangled, and Ellie's heart stops. She looks around frantically, in search of a face she can blame, but she’s alone this time, and Dina isn’t giving her any room.

Ellie hasn’t been more aware of how curved her spine is becoming than standing in front of Dina, looking her in the eye. With nothing to give her. At her mercy.

Silence rings in her ears before Dina explodes, but she knows its coming. She’s been here for days, and even now that she’s finally out of the house… Dina demands to know what she’s been thinking, how she could possibly show her face, who _the fuck she thinks she is_ , but Ellie has forgotten how to make words form that could possibly satisfy any of her questions.

Her heart hammers in her chest, like it might explode out of her with a mess of gore. At least that would be something she could offer up in good faith.

Ellie flees the first chance she has, when she feels that violence might break out if she hangs around. There’s a crowd growing to witness the carnage, so she dives into it as an escape. Faces pass her by in a blur, familiar but not, and she hears the whispers.

_Dina's girl_ ; that’s what some of them call her. Dina's girl, the one who up and left. The one who looks unrecognisable, if it weren’t for the raised tattoo on her arm. It makes her yearn to be back on the road.

This is Dina's home, not hers. Not anymore.

Her house is cold, and she follows the chill until she finds her, going through Ellie's meagre belongings like she had every right to do it. Though Ellie's body is weak, her anger still burns hot enough to pick a fight. She grabs her by the base of her hair, and knocks her to the floor with a crack of her knee. Something crumbles under the force, but Abby doesn’t react, doesn’t feel pain like Ellie does. She struggles a little against Ellie grip, but its half-hearted at best.

“Hey,” She gurgles, blood dripping from her nose and her mouth when she smiles. “You know the one about the two peanuts in the bar?”

“You got into my pun stash now?” Ellie can’t stand this. She didn’t think it would be harder. She didn’t exactly expect things to be easy here, but she feels more empty than ever, and she’s yearning for sun again like she never thought she would.

She’s suddenly hit with a wave of fatigue, a horrible reminder than Santa Barbara changed her permanently, in more ways than one, and wilts to the wall. Her fingers in the knots of Abby's hair push her down, forcing her head back so she can take a look at the face that told her _this_ might be a good idea. “I shouldn’t have come back here.”

“Yeah.” Abby whispers. She’s fading in Ellie's hands, grey skin and red eyes staring up at her, and Ellie can’t bear how much easier this is when her heart is still hammering with the memory of fresh air. She supposes she’s had a lot of practise. Abby doesn’t seem too phased, and smiles up at her with bloodstained and broken teeth.

“You should have died with me.” 

On the road, Abby hadn’t been so brazen. In fact, they had fallen into easy cohabitation outside of the occasional tantrum on both ends, but things are different now that there is no goal in mind. No more final destination.

They're both still here, and it seems like that’s not changing any time soon.

“I saw Dina.” Ellie gasps, realising only then that there are tears running down her cheeks. “Its not good.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Ellie releases her, folds fully against the wall in a crumpled pile as the last of her energy fails her. Abby relaxes back to sit beside her, as if nothing ever happened, and begins to talk endless about much that boy would've liked these books. Ellie hates to think of him. She tunes her out.

What did she expect? To be welcomed back? To feel like less of an animal, now that there are people around her, as if the pressure might break her back into personhood? Maybe.

Abby’s gurgled words do little in way of comfort, but they are familiar, and Ellie finds herself curling up into her, taking her arms and wrapping herself up in them. Even though she’s not warm, she’s a body, and she’s the only one Ellie can’t shake. Abby doesn’t fight her anymore, and rests her chin tiredly on top of Ellie's head; perfectly aligned so Ellie can feel her throat churn when she chokes on air, and listen to it when it rattles down into her frayed lungs.

Ellie doesn’t know why Abby still bothers with it, but the rise and fall of her chest still feels like breathing, and if she closes her eyes tight enough she can pretend that it is. That someone could ever hold her like this again.

They stay there until Ellie hurts to much to stay, and she drags herself back to bed. The sheets are too soft, almost to the point of discomfort, and even though its been days, Ellie still struggles to sleep in them. She’s used to hard surfaces, cold nights, and sleeping with her shoes on. She keeps them on again tonight, not able to shake the jittery feeling in her legs, as if they are getting ready to run from some perceived threat she can’t see.

Eventually, growing sick of her complaints, Abby rests down beside her, rolling her eyes and exclaiming loudly just how embarrassing she finds Ellie's display of weakness.

Ellie doesn’t even have the strength to argue with her.

*

Ellie goes out late at night to walk. It’s the only time she can without it feeling like her chest might cave in, but she still often finds herself sneaking around, like she shouldn’t be there.

There’s usually only ever a few guards at night, but Ellie doesn’t like being seen and sticks to the shadows. Most of the time, she just hangs around in the graveyard, circling around his plot like a dog with a tree. There’s so much to say to him, so many stories to tell, but she’s not really there yet, so they sit together in peaceful silence until Ellie is tired enough that she might sleep.

Abby never goes in with her. Ellie enjoys tossing out many a joke about ‘hollowed ground,’ facing your mistakes, and whatnot, but Abby never really rises to the bait. She’s waiting by the gates for her, watching the sun rise slowly over the trees with glossy eyes, and Ellie takes the rare moment to try and sneak up on her.

“Just checked,” Ellie says, startling her back to reality. “He’s not there, you can relax.”

Abby nods, working her jaw. She won’t even look at it. Ellie wants to wrestle her over to his grave and push her nose in it (push her in there with him if she can) but she’s too tired to cause that kind of scene. She still hasn’t fully recovered, having never given her body the time it needed, and she’s feeling feverish as usual in the dewy morning.

Abby gotten a little dramatic with time, and when she doesn’t get up straight away, Ellie finds she’s the one that’s been hooked.

“What are you thinking about?”

Abby blinks fast, like she’s bringing herself back from some place Ellie is glad she can't see. “I have dead people too.” Those are the words she chooses, after seemingly contemplating it for a while, but Ellie knows that. She wants more.

“Yeah, like who?” Its not fair, but Ellie has devoted so much of her life now to knowing about _hers_ , that she wants more. Even if it usually hurts a little. Its something they came up with on the road. Like a game.

She doesn’t think she’s going to answer her this time, but she does, with a cruel twist of her face, because she knows what Ellie wants from this. “Lev,” Ellie already wants to be sick. “He taught me how to whistle.” She draws in a deep, broken breath to release as a high shrill, one that makes Ellie's heart race and her palms sweat. She’s hates that sound. “Before you killed him, I mean.”

She does it again, two little whistles right after each other. “Its how the Seraphites communicated. I guess it was comforting for him, to have that, but it was really weird…”

Ellie takes off without her then, because she’s quickly draining herself. Everything feels like a drain on her now. Her joints crack when she moves.

She never really understood those books Abby likes so much, the ones where the heroines just, like, _faint_ all the time, but she’s really starting to. She receives a harsh push from behind every time she starts to wobble, and its almost like they have a running joke. She still doesn’t think she would have made it to this damn town without a genuine hell hound on her heels.

She’s still not sure she even wanted to in the first place.

The house is beginning to feel like… something, and Ellie is quickly becoming attached to the way it feels to be inside its walls. She’s too wired to sleep, but too exhausted to stand. The couch looks good, so she’s goes straight for it, laying across the length of the cushions and staring ahead at the blank television screen, willing it to spring to life. Miraculously, it does.

“Whoa!” She exclaims, before her brain catches up and she remembers she’s not alone here. Abby busies herself going through her movies, sighing when she realises they're all shit, and picks one at random to slide into the player. “Curtis and Viper? Really?”

“What?” Ellie doesn’t bother explaining, because Abby doesn’t get to ask her questions that could lead back to him, but she lets the movie play. She’s seen it before, a few times actually, but its nice to just be distracted by car chases and bullet spray for a while. Abby isn’t so easily entertained.

She sits on the floor and leans back ridiculing every insane escape from certain death the characters make it through, only silenced when Ellie's hand comes down hard on the top of her head like she’s an particularly irritating alarm clock. “If you’re good we'll watch the second one.”

“This has a _sequel_?”

“There’s four in total.”

“ _Four_?” Abby turns to give her the most horrified expression she’s seen on her yet, which is hard to believe, but she doesn’t think she’s done being surprised just yet. “You're lying.”

“I'm not! Watch the movie.” She gives her head a little shove back towards the screen. She’s icy to the touch, but Ellie clings to it the same way she used to back in that hellish California sun, letting her fingers brush lightly from the brim of her hair down to where it began to knit together into her signature braid. Ellie pulls it to her chest to begin unravelling it.

She does this unwillingly, needing something to do with her hands, but even half asleep she doesn’t miss the way Abby rolls her eyes before she tries to focus back on the events playing out on screen. Ellie can sense she’s working hard to keep her mouth shut.

She wakes up with a pain in her neck, and Abby hasn’t moved an inch. She’s staring at the fuzzy static playing on the TV, and Ellie only gets a second before she senses she’s awake.

“You still have nightmares.” Its not a question, but Ellie nods anyway. She dreams as if she is still rotting from the inside, still running poison through her veins, but she never remembers anything when she wakes up. She’s probably lucky too, because her heart is beating so hard she swears she can see it moving under her skin.

“Is it weird to be jealous?”

All Ellie knows is that if she couldn’t sleep, she would have lost it by now. She gets up only to climb into bed again, and sleeps more restless sleep.

*

Dina doesn’t feel bad about it. She’s not guilty, and doesn’t regret anything she said, but she does think about it. A lot.

Maybe yelling at her wasn’t the best course of action, and maybe she shouldn’t have done it, but Dina doesn’t feel guilty. She’s been holding that in for a long time, and even though she didn’t really get a good look at her between baggy clothes and shifty eyes, the catharsis feels the same. Maria gave out to her of course, but it was worth it, and even though she does not feel guilty, she does feel _something_.

And that’s what leads her, two days later, to stand in front of Ellie's new place, food packaged up to eat or to keep, whatever she needs. She had wrestled with coming for a while, but Dina has grown since Ellie left her crying in that kitchen. She knows when she can be more than she currently is, but more plainly when someone needs help. The part of her that once loved the woman inside of this house urges her forward, with her olive branch held in shaky hands.

It's an unusually cold autumn day, and Dina shivers as she climbs the steps up to the porch. Its nice, with a little table and a chair that she can’t imagine Ellie using much, from what she’s heard about the new her. The one she has to get to know now if she’s going to keep her head on straight. If not for herself, then for JJ.

There’s no signs of life from inside, and she’s torn between relief and dread but pushes both aside. She’s already talked herself in and out of this so many times that she doesn’t have it in her to start all over again, so she squares her shoulders, and carefully places her uneven pile of packages down on the table so she can knock freely. She doesn’t trust herself not to drop them when she sees her properly.

Maria made sure to warn her. The image in her mind is probably scarier than reality, but Dina is terrified to raise her fist and look into those eyes again. She’s seen enough change in them for a lifetime already; from the scrawny kid who guarded food like a dog, to a woman who loved more fiercely than anyone Dina has ever known, to someone who would look right through her and feel nothing when she did. She needs to do this, but it’s the hardest thing she’s had to do in a long time.

She’s still hanging there, refusing to let her knuckles meet the warped wood, when another shiver runs up her body. She feels a presence behind her - assumes its Ellie and that she has dropped by when she was out - and sucks in a deep breath.

This is it. Everything she’s been dreading since she heard she was back in town, but she can do this. She _has to do this_.

Risking a look over her shoulder – she swears she spots a blurry reflection in the windows, standing straight and strong – reveals nothing. In fact, Dina can’t see a single living soul from where she is. Just muddy streets and the sudden stench of something dead. As if an animal had burrowed into the foundations weeks ago, and met their end down there.

A frown makes its way across her brow. She’s no coward, but the sense that she is being watched is crawling under her skin and she’s jumpy with it. There’s no one there, but Dina takes a moment to close her eyes and will herself to stay where she is. Its just Ellie, even if things are different now, and Ellie doesn’t frighten her.

She turns back to the house and opens her eyes, only to wish she had just left when she could. If it weren’t for years of fearfully controlling the instinct she might have screamed, but instead the panic sends her rearing backwards. A figure stands between her and Ellie. Tall, sunburned, and rotting; Dina doesn’t even recognise her at first, but she’s not an idiot and puts two and two together fast. Her names catches in her throat.

Her feet carry her backward quick and steady, paces away until the repulsion stops choking her, but its not enough. Abby stares her down curiously, like she’s committing her to memory and she’s got all the time in the world to do it. There’s a smile hinting its way across her lips, smeared in red and decay. Blood drips down the steps in its excess, pooling into the dirt like its laying claim over the land itself and leeching into the soil. She doesn’t say anything, but Dina doesn’t need to hear it to know what this is.

She doesn’t stop to question herself, backing away until she can’t anymore, because this can’t be happening.

Dina sits halfway between panic and heartbreak when she finally turns away from that place. The whole way, she prays nothing is following behind her, but doesn’t turn to see for herself, not even once. She can hear her there anyway. Dina supposes she’s laughing at her, but it sounds choked, halfway between drowning and screaming. There’s no joy to be found in it.

She almost runs back to the main street, back to people and warmth and safety, and she drinks until the chill in her bones leaves her.

Dina decides there and then that she isn’t losing her mind, and that she can still do something. But not there.

She’s never going back there again.

*

Abby rarely leaves the house with her, but one thing she never misses is patrols.

It's not like she rides with them. She doesn’t sit behind Ellie on horseback with her arms wrapped around her middle like Dina would have, once upon a time, but she always makes her presence clear.

Most of the time Ellie doesn’t struggle to ignore her. Its usually nothing more than a flash of pale skin hidden in amongst the greenery, or a gruff scoffing from somewhere behind her when she trips over a root or misses a clear shot, but Ellie is used to this kind of behaviour and doesn’t even bat an eye. It dulls her senses just a little, but she hasn’t been surprised yet, but one day that changes. One day, Ellie slips up.

She’s not well liked by her partners on the trails. She doesn’t know it, but they all report back to Maria that she has an unsettling presence around her, that they come back and feel jittery all day as if they are being watched. That the horses always spook easier. Its not that Ellie herself cares much for their company either, and more than once she has found herself separated from them for no real reason. They would agree to split up - to check a building faster, so they could get home earlier, Ellie never really cared for the why of it all. She preferred to be alone anyway, especially when she’s hunting.

Who is she to stop people who want to leave her?

This particular day she’s alone in the streets of a particular town, when she’s struck by a memory, and urges her new mare into a gentle canter down dirt tracks. Her partner will go home without her, and what she has in mind is worth it.

Maria doesn’t let her drink much, meaning she doesn’t bring her any and Ellie is not capable of facing a crowd at the bar, but she remembers Dina's former mentor fondly.

She finds the library with no issue, doesn’t even bother closing the door before she retraces familiar steps down to the basement, all the while trying not to think about the last time she had. She feels she’s not alone, but doesn’t see anything amiss.

“Leave me alone, Abby.” She mutters, knowing that’s she’s certainly close enough to hear it, before she cracks open the door, and once again is faced with a treasure of dead weed. Extremely dead weed.

She expected Dina to have cleared the place out, but she must not have had the time with JJ on her hip. On her own. Ellie makes her way in silently, her fingers brushing crumbling plants as she goes; past a video player, little jars of seeds, a bong gas mask… a broken pile of glass and joints. She dives for them like she’s possessed by the sight, not caring if she nicks her skin in the process.

Her lighter sparks once, then again, and Ellie curses it viciously before fire catches the paper and she sucks in as deep as her lungs will let her.

“Are you seriously getting high right now?” Ellie isn’t surprised by the judgement in her tone, as that was her usual way of addressing her, but it is much easier to take when she knows she won’t be sober in twenty minutes.

“Only a little.” Ellie says, exhaling a wisp of smoke into the air. She falls down onto the couch before she can think better of it, before she can overthink it. “I’m taking the rest home, and maybe some seeds.”

“You can’t keep a plant alive that long.”

“You of all people should know how persistent I can be when I want something.” Ellie feels her approach, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “Maybe if you did you would take a hint and fuck off.”

Abby rounds the couch into her line of sight, staring her down with her arms folded tightly across her chest. She doesn’t often look at Ellie with more or less than distaste, but today its pure scorn. Ellie can’t hold back the snort, and chokes when smoke catches in the back of her throat. She coughs hard, suddenly wishing she had had the foresight to top up her water bottle before she left, but its good. Its better.

She doesn’t get any sympathy either. Abby flickers a little, in and out of reality as she tries to blink her away. She makes herself a little dizzy trying. “My tolerance must be way down.” She says to herself, watching Abby's frown dig deeper into her skin, like it might fray the broken edges and peel away from the muscle if she got any madder.

“This is really pathetic.” Ellie takes another long drag, ignores the way it burns the entire way down, and how cold her fingers are against her lips. She doesn’t really care what Abby thinks. She doesn’t even answer her, just takes thirsty quick drags that don’t feel quite right, until her lungs burn bright and warm in her chest. It’s a nice buffer for Abby's presence. “That stuff will kill you.”

That gets her attention. She waves it like incense in Abby’s face. “Its weed… I think I’m fine.”

“Drugs are drugs.” Ellie's eyes grow wide, because now she’s found something worth her time. She goes immediately for the offensive.

“I thought you said your dad was a doctor?” She says, reclining back against the cushions. She doesn’t want to see her face right now.

“Yeah.”

“Hmm, and how old were you when he died again?”

Abby grinds her teeth, but when she realises that Ellie isn’t giving her the time of day, bristles. “Why?”

“No reason, just to still be such a fucking daddy's girl… that’s all.” Ellie can hear her seething, and smiles a smile that actually feels kind of real. Maybe its just the high, but she almost feels good. She’s definitely taking the seeds. She will grow them if it kills her to do it.

Abby scoffs, a gruff rumbling sound like waves crashing around inside a cave. “Coming from you?” She spits, but she’s gone to wherever she likes to go (presumably to lick her wounds), before Ellie can open her eyes to retaliate.

She curses at the empty space, but Abby has ruined her moment, as she often does, and she pulls herself dully to her feet to pull together a decent to-go bag from the ruined remains of what was once a Utopia.

“You really had your shit together, Eugene.” She whispers to herself. She’s not so deluded anymore to think he can hear it. Someone like him wouldn’t have ended up trapped here, nothing like that.

Ellie hopes he’s allowed rest.

She’s halfway up the stairs when she hears a rustle of noise, and feels the stab of it all the way through her. She mutters a curse, and just like that, she’s back at her side breathing salt into her skin. “Horse is gone.” Abby rattles. “Nice one.”

“Whatever.”

“There’s three inside.”

“Fine.” Ellie already has her pistol ready, listening carefully for any signs of life. Abby appears across the room for a moment, then disappears again. Its clear to move on.

Ellie follows makes her way out into the larger library, where a stiff wind rattles the doors and a small group of runners have taken shelter from the rain. She curses her past self, but her shaky hand and quickening incoming stress headache tell a different story. Abby scoffs at her from the doorway.

“You're on patrol, aren’t you?” She leans against rattling doors, tall and intimidating and completely useless to Ellie right now. She blinks a few black spots from her vision.

She’s got a shiv, takes one out from behind as Abby throws critique at her like she’s a pony on show, and not a person struggling to quietly lower a body to the ground. The others go down to bullets, when she trips over something in a dizzy moment that gets her zeros across the board, but she’s alive and they are dead. That’s what she tells Abby anyway.

Without the horse, it’s a long walk back to Jackson, but Ellie doesn’t even try and look for it. It'll be getting dark, and if the poor thing had any will to live it would have headed in the same direction.

She walks in silence, with blood stains on her sleeves that soak through with rain in seconds. During her time on the road, she had taken to whispering to herself in the absence of others. During one of Abby's more successful attempts at getting under her skin, she had once left her for a month, creeping around of course but never close enough to tell. It had left her with a bit of a nervous tic - a twitch in her shoulder to stretch her peripherals – and a liking for her own company; the sound of her own voice.

When she finally arrives home (following several slow detours to explain herself in half truths), she immediately stores the last of the stale joints in a mug, presenting it on the kitchen table like a centrepiece. She hangs there a moment, counting four, before she thinks better of herself and takes one. She deserves it.

Its late, and after her verbal lashings from Maria she doesn’t care about food or the amount of dirty water glasses in her sink. She goes straight for her newly regifted PS3, to lounge on the couch and just try and shut it all off, and doesn’t waste a second in lighting up again.

She isn’t even past the loading screen before her fragile little bubble is burst and Abby's body blocks her view. “Hey!”

She leers down at her, reeking of death but Ellie doesn’t try and escape it anymore. Its as natural to her as breathing spores. She takes another drag and tastes the foul air on her tongue. She blows it up at Abby's face, and smiles when she recoils. As if she could still do her damage.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Abby rasps. She appears a little closer, still blocking out the TV, and Ellie is really getting tired of this shit.

“Don't you?” The music softly playing from Ellie's game cuts off, the screen flickering. Clearly, she doesn’t.

Abby settles beside her, as far away as the couch will allow her too, fading between completed and fracturing between blinks of Ellie's eye. She faces her, pulls the rest of her body to her chest as if she’s holding it all together through sheer force, and rolls her eyes when Ellie won’t look at her. “You fucked up today.” She says. Ellie stubbornly glares straight ahead and wills the TV to just _work_. “And its because you got high.”

Despite herself, despite how alone she has been even since she arrived to the place that should feel like home, Ellie laughs. She explains how this soothes her, how when she smokes she can forget and just exist for a moment, in words she knows even she would understand, if somehow their roles were reversed. Abby just nods along.

“I wish I had done more. When I could do stuff.” She says. Ellie grunts an acknowledgement, focusing on keeping her in-game car on the track, because she’s lost this damn race twice already and she won’t go to bed until she wins. Her time away and lost fingers have dulled her skills here too. Just another thing to add to a pile not worth acknowledging.

With that on her mind, she pauses and tosses her controller to the side. Abby grunts a little when it hits her, and Ellie just feels another rush of _guilt_ , because she didn’t mean to do that. She just assumed she would avoid it. Flick a switch and disappear or whatever.

Eventually, when she swallows that down, she says the only thing she can think of.

“I wish I’d done less.”

*

Maria doesn’t know what to do with her. 

The town quivered with her return, and there’s still ripples of it going through the community. People talk, and Maria can’t help but listen, even when she doesn’t particularly want to hear it.

Teenagers leave nasty notes on the news board sometimes, and even though Ellie will never see them, Maria has started visiting every other morning just to make sure there’s no new rumour spreading under her watch. Its not like Ellie is helping herself, and there’s only so much she can do, short of hauling her out of that damn house herself. Even though she doesn’t believe any of the shit she’s heard, she doesn’t like the way it feels in there.

It’s a cold place, one that feels damp like none of the other refurbished houses do, and Maria doesn’t like how much time she spends in there. Ellie may be immune to the cordyceps, but probably not to black mould and rot. Getting her back out on patrols hasn’t helped, yelling at her hasn’t helped, and even when Maria stopped bringing her food, Ellie seemed more willing to starve than join anyone outside for a meal.

She doesn’t know what to do with her, but everyone else is giving up, and that’s harder to accept than looking in those washed out eyes and begging her to just _go outside_. There’s a bonfire this weekend, she should go out, talk to people her age, get drunk and let loose or whatever it is that the young adults around here did when she wasn’t looking. 

Ellie sits at her kitchen table and levels her with a bored expression. “Why?” She asks, and Maria doesn’t get why she has to be so difficult.

“Why not?” She swears she hears Ellie's laugh reverbing back from behind her, and a chill passes along her neck. Maria’s a brave woman, always able to rise above her emotions when the moment calls for it, but there’s something so unnerving in the way Ellie smiles since her return. Like she has only even heard about the practise in theory, and is struggling to replicate it for an audience. She’s doing it now, but the rest of her face is schooled into a frown. Unnerving doesn’t begin to cover it.

Ellie looks up and over her shoulder, past her, and says something under her breath that clearly isn’t for Maria to hear. She doesn’t care to hear it. She’s heard all about Ellie's whisperings, and thinks better than to scrutinise it now. Instead, she clears her throat to get her attention again.

“Look, its up to you. I’m not going to make you do anything.” She says. She wants to get out of this house before whatever has cursed it gets to her too, and if that means leaving her here…

Ellie is an adult now. There’s only so much she can do. “But you can’t live like this forever. People need people.”

Ellie’s watery eyes narrow. “I have everything I need.” Her voice grates from her like it hurts on its way out.

Maria doesn’t know what to do with her, but she misses that kid Joel brought home from Utah; the one she let slip away when she left for Seattle. There’s not a day that goes by that she doesn’t regret not stopping her, not locking her in some basement until the bloodlust wore off like Tommy had suggested.

Looking at her now – hell, looking at the woman she abandoned at that stupid farm, the one she watched _grieve_ her – its clear it never would have. Ellie isn’t that girl anymore.

When Maria gets back outside it is as if a weight is lifted from her shoulders. The sun is welcoming, shining its brightest before the winter comes in.

She’s already dreading it.

*

Dina corners her during one of her rare trips outside to scavenge for food, and even though she’s visually alone, Ellie feels the air bristle around her.

She tries to avoid her eye and preferably possible conversation, but Dina has always been difficult to ignore, and eventually she has no choice but to acknowledge that she’s not getting out of this for any longer.

Someone once said something about bugs being more afraid of you than you might be of them, and it rings as a truth now. If she’s terrified, Dina is at least uncomfortable, skittishly looking around as if eyes watched them from empty windows. When she speaks, it’s a tone high than her usual pitch, and Ellie knows she is afraid. Of speaking to her, or some other equally frightful notion, Ellie isn’t sure, but she pays her immediate attention. She even risks a look at her, just for a second.

She’s always been the beautiful one, the prettiest girl Ellie’s ever seen, and the trials she has put her through haven’t changed that. They've hardened her, and she will never look at Ellie that way again, but she is still that girl, and Ellie doesn’t think she can handle seeing her like this. Or being seen like this.

Dina doesn’t have the same holdups. She stares directly at her, the way she would if she were just a clicker stuck in a fence. Ellie hates it.

“I dropped by your house the other day.” Dina says. “Left you food.”

“Yeah, I got it.” Ellie had assumed it had been Maria making sure she was keeping herself alive, and that Dina had made that effort to _try_ sends a shock through to her heart. “Why didn’t you come in?”

She needs to know, but she regrets asking.

Dina kicks idly at the ground. “I didn’t exactly feel welcome.” She says, and any hope that might have been ignited by this conversation is quickly snuffed out. Ellie shakes her head, but Dina cuts her off before she can say anything, raising a hand because she’s not done. She’s nowhere near done.

“I'm scared for you.”

“Don't be-"

“I don’t know what you did – _I don’t want to know_ what you did -” Ellie focuses on the road, on a string of snail slime that has left it glossy. “I think you need help.” Ellie's stomach drops. She’s starting to feel cornered, and her lips curl back over her teeth, more a threat than a smile.

“I'm fine.” She says. Spits is more accurate, and that venom lands squarely at Dina's feet. Ellie feels her begin to anger, and finds she’s almost forgotten what it feels like to receive anything else from her.

Dina says her name so much more softly than most do, but it still hurts. “Ellie, I can’t just let you waste away to this. For JJ, at least-"

“Leave me alone.” Ellie whines - an automatic response she’s not been able to kick - pushing past her and pasting her eyes shut. She can’t look at her without feeling the fragile remains of her self worth crumbling, and she already has someone filling that role. Permanently.

Dina grabs her before she can escape this time. “I saw her, Ellie.” She whispers, large eyes wide and filled with emotions Ellie can’t comprehend. She doesn’t really know if she ever could. “I can help.”

There’s a little red string tied around Dina's wrist, and the splash of colour sends Ellie back to places she can’t be anymore. She ducks away from her hand and the heat of her touch.

“There’s nothing fucking wrong with me.” She says, and it comes out like a hiss, not because she is angry, but because she’s tired. Except she is angry; she’s been angry for such a long time. “Don't come to the house again.”

Dina takes a step back, as she had reached out and struck her.

“Don’t worry about it.” Dina's voice is cold, but Ellie doesn’t feel the sting she expected, even when she looks into her eyes and sees nothing but distain. There’s pain there too, but Ellie can’t bear to search for it.

She leaves Dina shaking in the street, and goes home with her reasons for leaving at all forgotten. She walks past families and groups of friends who don’t know anything about her, who don’t look at her as she passes, but its more likely that they are all staring at her now. Even the newcomers seem to have heard whispers of her, and she stares at the ground until she’s safely tucked away back inside those four walls, and she can breathe fresh air again.

Ellie goes straight for the kitchen cupboards, only notices that she’s shaking when the glass she reaches for almost breaks the one beside it when she lifts it, and she needs to stop and close her eyes for a moment when she gets it safely to the counter.

She barely registers that she’s not alone, but there’s no denying when steadker arms than her own circle around her shoulders to calm her by force. It pitches her forward, her palms bracing against the laminate under Abby's weight.

The salty scent of blood coats her tongue and for a moment Ellie thinks she might vomit, but she hasn’t eaten since she ran out of weed and there’s nothing to regurgitate.

Slowly, she takes control of her breathing, and tries not to let this affect her. This didn’t mean anything, didn’t change anything, but she feels exposed and doesn’t like it.

“Dina says she saw you.” Ellie whispers. “How could she have seen you?”

Her eyes are wild, darting around to try and find something real to ground herself with. She’s caught by the sound of Abby's nails scraping plastic, clawing into fists around her.

“I don’t know,” she murmurs, her lips so close to Ellie's ear that the words echo. “But I don’t think I'm just in your head anymore.” Ellie shakes into her chest.

“And I brought you here.” Abby laughs that horrible laugh of hers, not quite genuine, but better than anything Ellie has heard in a while. She lets her eyes slip shut. “I can’t do this."

“Too bad.”

She’s right, of course, but Ellie still wants to grab a fork and jam it into her neck. Abby's hold tightens across her body, her arms curling around her and holding her tight. There’s no escaping her, the way she fills her up from the inside until there’s nothing but death left for her, but Ellie can take that. Even if it refuses to come for her body, Ellie feels more dead than Abby could possible ever be. She realises that she’s been holding her breath only because Abby is forcing her own.

“Do you think if I died, I'd be like you?” She asks the question just to feel Abby's fright through her, in the way the air thins. Ellie doesn’t know how much Abby exactly knows or understands about her stubborn presense here, but the odd jealousy in Ellie's chest keeps her up at night sometimes, and Abby has always refused her a straight answer.

This time is no different. In a spike of fear that she might disappear again, leaving her alone, Ellie changes the subject to the only thing she can think of.

“Can we watch movies again tonight?” She asks. Her chest heaves into Abby hands, solid and _there_.

She feels her grinning against her cheek. “Only if I get to pick.”

She can settle for that.

“Deal.” 

*

There’s a bonfire that night, but Ellie doesn’t go. She lays on the couch and watches movies from Joel's collection, chattering incessantly with nothing anyone else can see.

She rests her head on Abby's lap this time, lets her run her fingers through awful, shaggy hair, and its almost normal. Almost like living.

No one comes by to see her, but Ellie has everything she needs. At least until she runs out of DVDs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you if you're back again for more of this!!! I have no idea when or if there will be more, but I hope you enjoyed this!
> 
> Please leave a comment or whatever im very hungry


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